and yet...

I have been thinking about this entry for a while.  Sometimes my thoughts sit inside my head, sort of rolling around in circles in restlessness, as if they are looking for that just-right-perfect place and time to settle into permanence.

In the last year I have done some things that I would never have guessed possible.  I have reached milestones that I never thought of and caught stars I’ve never seen before.  None of these realizations are on anyone’s list of “things to do” and yet here I am.  I have first been given the news that no mother can truly imagine, and yet I did not stop breathing instantly, though it may have felt like I should.  I woke up the next day, and the next and the next; I have seen many tomorrows from that day that I melted on the floor in front of my baby’s urn at the funeral home.  Like an out-of-body experience, the image haunts me some.  But I have seen them, those tomorrows, and survived each somehow.  I have cried so many tears I am sometimes certain there can be no more, and yet, then again, I reach another milestone: another tear. 

I have reached out to others with losses like mine and comforted when it did not seem I could even comfort myself.  I created a project and seen it brought to fruition; it has become a beautiful tribute to her, and yet, sometimes it tires me to exhaustion to worry about it so, as though I am an inattentive parent caught up in work, and days and hours and life.  

I have taken more pictures in the last few months than I may have in my whole life, and they are beautiful and yet, many of them are, I guess only made-up memories of something that I cannot have, and so I reach for anything that seems solid. Yes they are pictures, but pictures of what? Of butterflies, and pennies, and sunsets and what?  Not her.  Not an angel.  Not a dream, or a memory.  I take pictures for what?  For me?  For her?  For no one? Nothing? Ashes?  I don’t know.  I take them, and I feel them.  I pick up pennies and I think of her.  But she was just a baby, how can she leave me pennies?  How can she give signs?  Why do I want to reach for them and yet wonder how it’s all anything? I wish I had more faith, and yet sometimes I think that I have none.  Sometimes I have none. 

 I have made more new acquaintances in the last year than perhaps in my whole life.  And, though I am glad for each, I wish it had never been. 

            All of these occurrences and yet, yet… maybe I am nothing more than what I was before.  But I am.  I am here.  I am sadder.  I am less.  What have I become if nothing has changed?  On the surface we are still the same family we were before: two girls, two parents, two cats.  We have the same goals, the same dreams.  It is as though she was never here.  And yet,… And yet my heart still hurts.